Dear dimwit on the phone

We have a softball and baseball HOF for high school here. So I'm guessing a high school HOF.

 

Not a phone call, but a conversation I had tonight during a break in the state wrestling tournament:

Lady 1: Ya know, KYSW, that the elementary school state tourney is tomorrow. Are you covering that?
Me: No. We don't usually cover anything below middle school.
Lady 2 (who overheard the conversation): Well, why not? The kids try just as hard ...
Me: I know they do, and I'm not saying that so please don't put words in my mouth. We're not covering the "tournament" because we have tons of other stuff going on, like getting previews done for the basketball district tournaments.
Lady 1: So you won't be here tomorrow?
Me: Facepalm ... no, I will not be in Frankfort tomorrow. If you'd like, you can e-mail a picture in if your son places tomorrow.
Lady 1: So you're saying you're not covering state?

Finally, a wrestler I'm waiting to interview walks up.

Me: Ma'am, I've told you how to get results in the paper. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to work.

She walks off, muttering something about being pissed off that I won't be there to cover Little Johnny when he loses in the first round.

 

An elementary school state tournament? I'd refuse to cover that on principle. I don't cover JV or middle school. My reasoning used to be that I'm a one-man shop. A couple of years ago, I started to hear how kids with the talent to play up a level were refusing to do so, in order to star on either their middle school team or on JV. I refuse to feed JV glory.

 

I don't know how common it is, but my small-county coverage area has halls of fame for soccer and baseball/softball. The main city in the county has its own basketball and football halls of fame. Of course, their main goals are fundraising for scholarships, but still.

 

Here's what most of these dimwits don't realize - if a kid is playing JV past the midpoint of his sophomore year, he's not likely to play anything in college. Therefore, spending that much time glorifying a bunch of kids who won't amount to anything athletically is a waste of everyone's time.

Yes, they're having fun. But no, they don't work as hard as everyone else - or else they'd be on the varsity team.

 

As a former JV football player, I would like to say that I am offended by this statement.

I would like to say that.

Unfortunately, it's pretty true.

 

Got my annual voice mail from somebody complaining that we failed to cover a significant high school basketball game. "I looked through the whole paper, there's not a word about it, I can't believe you didn't cover that game." Except that we did, there's a story on Page 5 and two photos ... and it's teased off the front page.

Maybe he's a dimwit, maybe he needs new glasses .. or maybe, and I'm being most charitable here, he'd picked up the wrong day's paper.

Of course, and this never fails, he didn't leave a call-back number.

 

People like that sometimes make me want to actually cover their event -- and then write in excruciating detail about how unathletic Little Johnny is. Really scar him for life. It's never too early to cost someone a scholarship.

 

Woman is very upset - Her husband is going to jail for 15 years for first degree child abuse. He maintains that he's innocent, which has her hooked, although the evidence against him is pretty strong; he confessed to police, after initially trying to cover it up and say that the kid had brittle bone syndrome. (The child is with his now ex-wife.)

Anyway, we've reported on it twice, each time getting very, very angry responses from the wife about how can we do this, etc., and oh by the way, stop using my address, he doesn't live here in Smithville with me, he lives in North Smithville. I check and double check - His given address is Smithville on all the court papers, and he confirms that it is his address in his final court hearing.

Fun times. During that last hearing I think I figured out why the new wife is so insistent he doesn't live there - He and her have had a kid, and I believe part of his bail before found guilty by a jury was that he couldn't be in unsupervised contact with infants.

 

My new slogan:

 

I don't know if I should be surprised by this or not, but because of either space restrictions or deadline pressure (and sometimes both), I haven't been running JV or freshman basketball scores most of this year - and no JV wrestling at all. I haven't run any JV/frosh at all this month. Even in the past, it was just a paragraph for each at the end of the varsity article, so both games together maybe got 10 lines.

So far, no complaints at all. The only one I got was earlier in the season when I still had the time to put in freshmen boys but freshmen girls weren't turning in their results. ONE reader complained about not running the girls. The JV boys coach is still bringing me the book and I copy the stuff down, so I don't know if he's not paying attention to the fact that it's not getting in or he's just bringing it to me just I case I get a chance to stick it in somewhere.

So if I'm getting away with not running this stuff, I figure I never have to mess with that stuff ever again. Why should I run stuff no one's demanding?

 

Do you have any way to measure it besides the fact that people aren't writing in to complain about it, i.e. website hits? I run a Patch site, so I do get reports about hits for each article, and I have noticed that including a JV result will get some more traffic. All I normally do is a list of who scores, and maybe three to four sentences describing the game.